A Letter to my Mom about CA Proposition 8

This vote is really close and protectmarriage.com is throwing around a lot of silly lies about what will happen if it doesn’t pass, esp with regard to education. It’s all untrue — California law prohibits any health or family teachings from being taught against a parent’s will. Similarly, the stuff about churches losing their tax-exempt status is impossible by specific wording in the law. There’s more, but the bottom line is that all Prop 8 does is write discrimination against one group of people into the state constitution.

No matter what you think about what the word “marriage” means — it does not belong In the California constitution. Trying to say “civil unions can be just the same” is not only legally untrue, it’s also an example of the separate-but equal limbo that blacks endured until it was determined that it’s just another kind of discrimination that doesn’t improve anyone’s life.

If this law passes and you voted for it, you will have helped consign people who love each other to a lifetime of struggle for equality and isolated unhappiness. I don’t understand why you would want to do that to people you don’t know and who have no effect on your life.

And what if Grey turns out to want to marry another man? He’ll be the one who has to fight for every benefit that marriage already enjoys. He’ll the the one with the second-class union, permanently stuck at the card table during the Thanksgiving meal of marital bliss. He’ll be the one wondering why his grandma did not want him to have a happy stable life with someone he loves.

I don’t understand why you would risk doing that to people you love just because you think marriage should only mean one thing.

Please vote no. Vote no because doing so won’t change your life in any way at all, and it can change the lives of others unimaginably. Vote no for Grey — just in case. Vote no for me, because it’s really important to me.

3 Users Responded In This Post

I completely agree.The people who voted for this should all be ashamed of themselves. Being happy and spending your life with the one you love should never have to be a lifelong struggle. Anyone who has been through the ringer with Cupid should already understand that. It shouldn’t have to take being gay to understand this.

As delighted as I was by the election results generally, this felt like a kick in the nuts, and I don’t actually have any. But what if I did, and I wanted to marry my adorable and introverted boyfriend?! I can only hope that our children and our children’s children will look back at this the same way we look at the Jim Crow laws and say, “Whoa – how the heck did that ever happen?”

Asinine, the whole damn thing. (Oregon has its own Measure 36 to answer for from a few years ago.) As happy as I was to see Obama win and see the thrilled African-American voters wait in long lines to cast votes in the election, that was the voting bloc that put 8 over the top. It was borderline in many populations, but that bloc tends to be very socially conservative. That this phenomenon has led to a new Jim Crow era is doubly disturbing.
Another thing I found interesting was that there were Christian churches in California marrying same-sex couples years before San Francisco began doing it, so this is not only writing a religious tenet into the CA constitution but in essence legislating which flavors of Christianity are state sanctioned. Of course, you could say the government has been doing that since the Mormon polygamists were hounded west to Utah and persecuted even there. (Again, a group once pushed down doing the same to another.)